News

Please join the artists Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen for a lecture about their work, and more specifically, the new book they just completed called A Limited Anthology of Edits. It will take place on Friday June 25th at noon in the New Video Gallery at Portland State University. The talk is a part of the completion of the artists' MFA degree and is happening in conjunction with their MFA thesis exhibition, which is currently on view. CLICK ON IMAGE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Saturdays at 11am at PDX Contemporary Art:

Saturday, July 10th: Anne Marie Oliver
Saturday, July 17th: Sean Regan
Saturday, July 24th: Helen Reed
Saturday, July 31st: Barry Sanders
In conjunction with their exhibition "The Classroom" - a body of work which examines the politics and aesthetics of education - Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen and PDX Contemporary Art will host a series of short lectures on Saturday mornings during the month of July. Four local educators will use the objects of The Classroom to present on a variety of topics including fan-culture, pedagogy, language, philosophy and literacy.

Lecture Schedule (Saturdays at 11 am at PDX Contemporary Art, 925 NW Flanders Street): CLICK ON IMAGE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen, whose show "The Classroom" is on display at PDX in July, are exhibiting this month both here in Portland as well as in Miami, FL. The Portland show is a group exhibit as a culmination to the PSU Masters of Fine Art program. In Miami, "How to Read a Book" explores classic literature and fiction and the relation to contemporary art.

D.E. May in "Northwest Artists Draw"
May 7–July 3, 2010

Together with work by artists Michael Brophy, Cat Clifford, Eben Goff and Helen Loggie, D.E. May presents works that focus on drawing and the creation of handmade objects.

MONTHLY ARTIST TALKS SERIES CONTINUES AT PORTLAND ART MUSEUM

JUNE 10th - STORM THARP

The second Thursday of each month offers the unique opportunity to casually explore pieces in Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection through the inspired lens of a local artist. All talks depart at 6 p.m. from the Hoffman Lobby and are followed by a lively happy hour with the artist until 8 p.m. that includes complimentary food, beer, and wine. Free for members or with Museum admission, but tickets are required. Space is limited to the first 45 ticket holders. Advance tickets are available at the box office.

On June 10th, Storm Tharp will lead a discussion about the biographical, philosophical, and aesthetic building blocks shared by Agnes Martin’s painting, Untitled #15, and Shirakura’s four-paneled literati painting, Visiting A Mountain Recluse. He is drawn to how Martin essentially abandoned her life in New York in order to pursue a humble and rigorous practice, living alone in New Mexico. Regarding his selection, Tharp expounds, "It may not be accurate to say that Agnes Martin was a recluse, as she maintained friendships and business relations with a select few. But it is fair to suggest that she turned her back on the voices and the influence of her day in order to locate the purest form of unadulterated inspiration within herself that she translated into painting." Considered a Minimalist in the canon of art history—suggesting a contemporary intention of formal reduction and essentialism—Tharp rather romanticizes her practice to be "reminiscent of a master Chinese calligrapher from the 12th century."

Storm Tharp was raised in Ontario, Oregon. He attended Cornell University and received a BFA from the College of Architecture, Art, and Urban Planning in 1992. Upon graduation, Tharp moved to Portland, Oregon where he presently resides. His work is representational—by both figurative and conceptual means—and expressed through a variety of media. Tharp was one of fifty-five artists selected to exhibit in the prestigious 2010: Whitney Biennial for which he created a series of new portrait works. He is represented by Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York City, Galerie Bertrand & Gruner in Geneva, Switzerland, and PDX Contemporary Art, where his solo exhibition Hercules will be on view June 1-26, 2010.

*****

The show makes a strong argument for photojournalism’s interacting with art. In the context of Nina Berman’s photo series depicting a soldier disfigured by a suicide bomber in Iraq and Stephanie Sinclair’s gruesome shots of Afghan women who have self-immolated as a form of protest, the stained, splotchy faces in Storm Tharp’s washy gouache portraits begin to evoke abrasions or burns. The theme of bodily disfigurement is continued elsewhere in the juxtaposition of Thomas Houseago’s hulking, seemingly hacked-at sculpture of a crouching figure with David Adamo’s installation comprising an ax, its wooden handle cracked and eroded, stuck into the wall and surrounded by whittled-down canes. Adamo’s ax appears to have done a number on Houseago’s statue, while the canes evoke missing limbs.
Not that "2010" doesn’t make missteps. I wanted to like the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s installation: a hearse, headlights ablaze, playing on its windshield clips from various TV shows and movies to a soundtrack ranging from "A Whiter Shade of Pale" to the "Star-Spangled Banner" and including a voice-over recounting an aborted love affair with the U.S. ("We fucked America to make America disappear"). But the work comes off as juvenile, bathetic, too tongue-in-cheeky by half. One marvels that light fare can be so heavy-handed; Josephine Meckseper displays a far more nuanced take on capitalism’s ills in her brooding video meditation on Minnesota’s sprawling Mall of America. And although Lorraine O’Grady’s sepia-tinged photographs of Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire convey something ineffable about the romantic nature of celebrity and America’s worship of it, their pairing with the Bruces’ piece feels ponderous. Still, O’Grady’s photos beat out by miles Daniel McDonald’s kitschy sculpture in the museum’s lobby of Jackson with Uncle Sam being rowed across the river Styx by Charon, which has all the subtly of Beetlejuice-era Tim Burton.CLICK FOR FULL REVIEW

May 14 - July 9, 2010

In regard to her large-scale installation, Marie Watt, Seneca artist, states, "Forget-me-not is about memory, story, and devotion. In part, it stems from my disinclination toward the abstraction of war by the modern media." The Iroquois concept of “mother” is broad, extending from one’s mother through a long line of women. She views Forget-Me-Not as a continuing dialog. "I asked the men I know to suggest women who were significant to them to include in this work." Forget-Me-Not consists of weblike constructions of portraits of soldiering sons and their mothers. "Some of these women were mothers in the physical sense; others gave to our culture in other ways." Ms. Watt's work draws from indigenous design principles and oral tradition. She uses a vocabulary of natural materials (stone, wool, cedar, cornhusks,) and forms (blankets, pillows, bridges) that are universal to human experience. Her large-scale works bring about an intimate focus.

More information about the exhibit at http://www.tamastslikt.org/exhibits.cfm

SATURDAY MAY 15th:
In conjunction with our May exhibition, "Cut-ups" by Gus Van Sant, PDX will sponsor transportation to the opening of "ONE STEP BIG SHOT: Portraits by Andy Warhol and Gus Van Sant" at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene.

REGISTER TODAY FOR YOUR SPOT ON THE RESERVED COACH BUS: http://uoalumni.com/jsma-bus. The registration fee is $10 and covers your round trip from Portland to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

view article at: http://www.artforum.com/words/#entry25387

The Academy Award winning director Gus Van Sant is well known for his unparalleled vision in cinema, as well as his original screenplays. An accomplished artist as well, he is debuting two bodies of photographic work in Oregon this month. “Cut-ups” opens at PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, on May 5, and “One Step Big Shot: Portraits by Andy Warhol and Gus Van Sant” will be on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, from May 16 to September 5.

A multidisciplinary panel of Portland artists whose work has had a strong relationship to Donald Judd's. This will be a be a thought provoking discussion about intersecting influence, precedent, examples and the inevitability of where these artists differ from Judd. Of particular interest is the inter-artist note-comparing portion of this gathering as they all produce such divergent work.

Where : Pacific Northwest College of Art.1241 NW Johnson, Portland OR

Hosted by the Painting Dept Room 201

When : Saturday April 17th. 3 PM

Moderator: Jeff Jahn